The Painted Double: Figuration, Language, and the Limits of Representation

Abstract

This practice-led research project traces understandings of doubling and legibility within historic and contemporary examples of figurative painting. Despite painting's capacity to present images before our eyes, it has always been haunted by a certain kind of absence. The painted image, in its negotiation of these two states, is doubled from the outset. This inquiry interrogates how the painted image continues to wrestle with this duality through a studio investigation that traverses questions of reading, prying open, folding, and the space between interiority and exteriority. In this project I interrogated the various ways the notion of the double can be used to reformulate conventional accounts of legibility through the painted image. I work through this question by drawing on the work of post-structuralists such as Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, and artists such as Piero della Francesca, Philip Guston, Simon Hantai, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, and Luc Tuymans. The theoretical and practice driven aspect of the project grapple with examples of doubling as well as the duality of presence and absence that defines image-making in general. Since paintings require us to see two surfaces at once - a surface of matter and a surface of inscription - I propose that it is necessary to attend to this complex sense of twofoldness, in order to provide alternative frameworks for the enmeshed relations between image and text in contemporary figuration. This research contributes to the field of contemporary painting through a body of original creative work alongside a critical account of painting's relationship with doubling and language. My studio research is tested and situated alongside historical and contemporary examples of doubling, where I demonstrate that painting is bound to, and yet also finds ways to resist, the transitive confines of language. I propose that language itself is characterised as a process of doubling through its association with repetition and differentiation, despite its usual representative associations with communication and the transmission of pre-determined ideals. This inquiry reveals how figurative painting can enfold multiple histories and ways of knowing into a generative, discursive space of meaning making, showing how painted images, especially those that resist conventional ways of signification, present what it means to inscribe ourselves in this world.